Friday, August 29, 2014

F3 The First Signal

The mood in
ground control had gone from placid to frenetic in a matter of minutes. Carl
Jensen had been the first one to notice the signal, and after double-checking
it, began to wake up every engineer and supervisor in JPL. Of course, the word
spread far beyond those people like wildfire.

The news
surpassed everything. The moon and Mars landings were nothing. Ganymede Station
was a paltry feat of assembly and positioning. And while the specifics of Argo’s
engineering were not as technical as the Olympus Mons colony, the signal from
Argo was more exciting.

Over the
last few hours, images from Argo’s cameras came in steady bursts before it
began repeating what it had sent. The repetition was necessary due to signal
interference and the distance. The repetition allowed the engineers to fill in
the gaps and recreate missing pieces until they had pictures as accurate as
what Voyager had sent back over a century before. By pairing the pictures of
the stars along with the factoring in the time it had taken the signal to reach
them, they could locate Argo’s exact position.

Argo’s
mission was simple, travel outside the heliopause and deploy the sail-kite.
After ten minutes, cut the sail free, and begin transmitting back to Earth. And
now, after almost three months, they received a signal. Jensen ran the images against
the star charts one more time, confirming his finding before passing it off to
the director, whose grin enveloped his face.

Director
Michaels silenced the room with taps to his lapel mike. “Ladies and gentlemen,
congratulations are in order. We have confirmation that Argo, in its ten minute
sail-powered flight, covered a distance of .3 light years.”

Excited
murmurs filled the control room, along with gasps of anticipation as the
Director continued.